WeChat Mini-Programs expected 500 million users in Q1 2018

With ticket grabbing WeChat Mini-Programs going viral, WeChat Mini-Program games see peak concurrent active users reaching 28 million per hour. Mini-games “Jump” (Tiaoyitiao) sold its advertising opportunity to Nike at 20 million yuan (US$3.1 million); and, WeChat started Mini-Programs’ advertising internal testing. The commercialization of WeChat Mini-Programs has entered into a new stage. You can check out the status report here.

As of March 2018, the number of WeChat’s monthly active users exceeded 1 billion. However, unlike WeChat’s steady growth, the monthly active users of Mini-Programs was only 2 million in January 2017. Nevertheless, with constant updates and iterations, adding the mini-games in December, Mini-Programs achieved explosive growth. As of December 2017, WeChat Mini-Programs had 400 million users, accounting for nearly 50% of WeChat users, this figure is expected to reach over 500 million in Q1 2018.

Rich usage scenarios attract users to spend more and more time on WeChat Mini-Programs. The average duration of Mini-Programs has increased to 9.8 minutes by December 2017, accounting for about one-fifth of users’ time spent on WeChat per day.

However, Mini-Programs failed to improve user retention rate, which slides from 13% to 3% in a week. In contrast, the user retention rate of mini-games “Jump” is still as high as 52%. The average traffic growth of smart retail Mini-Programs is increasing rapidly from 11% to 56% month-on-month in 2017. Moreover, smart retail Mini-Programs also saw a huge rise in average order volume per month, a 40% increase in Q4 2017.